Mr. X plays riddle me this, riddle me that.

ather than do the right and brave thing and address my rebut­tals to every last one of his six objec­tions to the unbro­ken suc­ces­sion of popes, Tur­ret­inFan (known on this blog as Mr. X) decides to plow on as if noth­ing had hap­pened and invent a sev­enth. Well, okay, he says. And what about the non-exis­tent Pope John XX?

Now, this kind of thing, when you get right down to it, is no more than an attempt to turn anti-Catholic claims into a game of Rid­dle Me This. Can you throw your oppo­nent for a loop? Well, what about this pope? Well, what about that pope? So it goes with Mr. X.

Apart from his open­ing, and aim­less, remarks about how pseu­do-Catholics Joe Biden and Gar­ry Wills are great big fans of Pope John XXIII, the point of Mr. X’s blog arti­cle is to go search­ing back through this list of popes for a miss­ing John. Bran­dish­ing his mag­ni­fy­ing glass, Mr. X uncov­ers some real dis­crep­an­cies indeed:

[B]etween John XIX and John XXI you won’t find a John XX. Why not? Because John XXI made a mis­take. He thought that sev­er­al of his pre­de­ces­sors had been off by one in their count of the num­ber of pope Johns. He thought that there was a [P]ope John between John XIV and John XV, who had not been prop­er­ly iden­ti­fied. So, he was try­ing to cor­rect it. Yet he was mis­tak­en.

You would almost think that Mr. X had iden­ti­fied the sec­ond gun­man on the Grassy Knoll. Read­ers of the blog may remem­ber this ear­li­er arti­cle; in it I quot­ed Vat­i­can I’s def­i­n­i­tion of the dog­ma of infal­li­bil­i­ty to the show that the charism is restrict­ed to “doctrine[s] con­cern­ing faith or morals” (IV.9). But lest we think that Mr. X has mis­read Pas­tor Aeter­nus and thinks it says “a doc­trine con­cern­ing faith or ordi­nals,” he admits that that is not his claim. Well, well, then. So what is his claim? Let us read on:

My point is broad­er. If the pope can­not fig­ure out which pope John he is, do you real­ly think he can define dog­ma infal­li­bly? Like­wise, if the popes John them­selves can­not fig­ure out the chain of suc­ces­sion, so as to know which ordi­nal num­ber goes with their name, what makes you think that this chain of suc­ces­sion is his­tor­i­cal­ly reli­able and has any real mean­ing?

So Mr. X tries to con­vict the papa­cy on a tech­ni­cal­i­ty. And there­in hangs a tale. For time and again, the Protes­tant apol­o­gist reveals just how dim is his basic under­stand­ing of the point of papal infal­li­bil­i­ty. The rea­son God gave the pope this charism in the first place—the only reason—was to pro­tect the Church from error in faith or morals. When defin­ing ordi­nals, nei­ther the puri­ty of Church teach­ing, nor the uni­ty of Chris­tians, is at stake. The Holy Spir­it does not pro­tect the pope from error when he counts num­bers. It is not a ques­tion of: If the pope is infal­li­ble in large things, he must also be infal­li­ble in small things, all the way down to point­less triv­ia. It is not as though, to be of any use, infal­li­bil­i­ty has to also mean that the pope knows the exact num­ber of jel­ly beans in the jar; or drops of water in the Pacif­ic Ocean; or the num­ber of paces between the Tiber Riv­er and Mr. X’s left pinky toe. By no means. Rather, infal­li­bil­i­ty is a charism that the Holy Spir­it grants the pope only under very spe­cif­ic cir­cum­stances and for very spe­cif­ic pur­pos­es. To claim oth­er­wise is a fun­da­men­tal mis­un­der­stand­ing of the doc­trine, and the pur­pose, of infal­li­bil­i­ty.

And if Mr. X real­ly means to sug­gest that a miss­ing ordi­nal between John XIX and John XXI means that there was a gap in the suc­ces­sion where John XX would have been, then I sub­mit to you that he’s play­ing you for a suck­er for sophistry.

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